Category Archives: Blog

We’ve all been there. You go out to lunch with a friend and she shows up looking completely fabulous and talking about just how fabulous her life is and you can’t help sitting there thinking “yeah. I hate her.”

What do you mean “you hate her”? She’s your friend! Shouldn’t you be happy that she looks great and her life is so great? Yes. Yes you should. But you know what…

When Ben is in his highchair and I’m cleaning the floors and dishes. And his arm magically transforms into a windshield wiper against the high chair tray. Waffle and oranges fly across the room. Rising up inside of me is a piece of my heart that is angry and impatient. And then I catch my son’s eyes–bright and bubbling with laughter–and that angry little piece of me dies.

I was depressed. I was in a dark place. I was holding this beautiful baby in my arms and I felt like the farthest thing from beautiful. I undressed at night and stared in the mirror at a reflection of a body that I didn’t know. I touched my skin and traced lines that had appeared overnight and led to places that hadn’t been there before. And I felt lost, and confused, and a little angry, because this body wasn’t mine. This wasn’t me. But here’s the thing. It was. And I needed to accept it. I needed to stop hating my body because it was making me hate myself. And that needed to stop.Continue reading →

My freshman year of college had been one helluva party, but it was a disaster in many ways: academically, personally, spiritually. I spent the first semester discovering alcohol and losing little bits of myself. My closest friends expressed concern, but that just pissed me off. So I drifted. And I drifted.

There was a moment in my life, not that long ago, when I realized who I really was. Not in the soul-discovering existential sense, but a quite literal one. I was strolling down the cobble-lined streets of Park Avenue with Infant Ben tucked neatly beneath a powder blue blanket. I had brushed my hair, dressed in a real bra (nursing moms feel my pain) and gotten out of the house. My best friend of 25 years was in town and we found ourselves window shopping, eating ice cream cones, and leisurely basking in the crisp weather of a Florida fall. I was also sleep-deprived and incredibly grouchy despite my surroundings. Lunch was taking forever, the sidewalks were crowded, and women with children were bustling in and out of stores with armfuls of shopping sacks. It was like somebody had kicked a human baby anthill in the heart of Winter Park.Continue reading →